Craig Herndon/The Washington Post/Getty Images
An essayist, cultural theorist, novelist, educator and biographer who died on August 18 at 97, Albert Murray spent more than five decades developing his thesis that America is a culturally miscegenated nation. His contention was that blacks are part white, and vice versa: that both races, in spite of slavery and racism, have borrowed from and created each other. In all of his writing, jazz music — derived from the blues idiom of African-Americans — was the soundtrack at the center of his aesthetic conception.
For the Alabama-bred, Tuskegee Institute-educated, New York-based Murray — and his Tuskegee classmate and aesthetic fellow traveler Ralph Ellison, author of Invisible Man — jazz was "the embodiment of the American experience, the American spirit, the American ideal," he is quoted as saying in Jazz: A History of America's Music, the companion book to the PBS documentary series for which he served as commentator and artistic consultant. It was the creation of a sepia panorama of black, brown and beige people, partially descended from Africa but fully Euro-American in outlook, character and aspiration.
"The omni-Americans are the Americans. My conception makes Americans identify with all their ancestors." —interview in American Heritage, September 1996
To fully understand Albert Murray's jazz aesthetic, a vital part of the worldview he called "Cosmos Murray," you have to read his first book, The Omni-Americans (1970). The collection of essays counter-states "the folklore of white supremacy and the fakelore of black pathology" as social-science fictions that dehumanize black people as inferior. "American culture, even in its most rigidly segregated precincts, is patently and irrevocably composite," he writes.
In The Omni-Americans, Murray critiques black authors Richard Wright and James Baldwin for creating clichéd views of black life; Afrocentric romanticism and the separatist tendencies of Black Nationalism; and well-meaning but paternalizing U.S. inner city social programs. Murray's answer to such folly is the blues: home-grown black music that acknowledges the "essentially tenuous nature of all human existence ... through the full, sharp and inescapable awareness of them." In the subsequent essay collection The Hero and the Blues (1973), Murray celebrates the bluesman as an epic hero who, in his tragicomic lyricism, confronts the difficulties of life through the creation of a resilient art.
"We invented the blues; Europeans invented psychoanalysis. You invent what you need." —interview in American Heritage, September 1996
Musically speaking, all this leads up to Stomping the Blues (1976). Beautifully illustrated with vivid period photos, LP covers and broadsides of black jazz icons, Stomping represents the zenith of his writing on the subject. Eschewing a bleak sociological approach for affirmative, literary prose, Murray celebrates jazz as the most advanced and comprehensive blues-derived art form, one which ritualistically provides people with "equipment for living." The music serves as a "stylistic code for representing the most difficult conditions, but also provides a strategy for living with and triumphing over those conditions with dignity, grace, and elegance." In other words, one does not kill the blues, but one can, by what he called "the velocity of celebration," stomp the blues to keep them at bay.
Read more: http://www.npr.org/blogs/ablogsupreme/2013/08/24/214831904/what-albert-murray-taught-us-about-jazz?ft=1&f=1039
0 Comments:
Post a Comment